December 2, 2011

Now, I’m not some huge Muppets fan or anything. I haven’t even seen all their movies. But I like the Muppets, and this movie excited me. I really wanted to see it! What I got wasn’t what I was bargaining for.

When the Muppets are being funny, they are awesomely funny. There are amazingly good jokes throughout this movie. I did many laughings throughout the film. But the movie was dead set on constantly killing any momentum of its jokes by becoming amazingly, overwhelmingly sentimental over and over again. Here I am, sitting in a theater, watching a movie called The Muppets, and constantly Kermit the Frog is putting on this super sad face because “nobody loves us anymore, and we need to work together, but how can we make people love us?” PEOPLE LOVE YOU. THAT’S WHY WE’RE IN THE THEATER WATCHING YOUR MOVIE. It felt so fake and so deliberately designed to tug at nostalgia heartstrings. It would have worked if kept to a minimum, but you’d have a scene of fun and funny jokes, and then a scene of this bullshit, over and over. It’s like they couldn’t just establish their premise, which was a fine premise for this movie, and then just move on with it and have fun. They had to treat their plot super serious, which is just not why I wanted to watch The Muppets. But maybe that’s not the case with everyone else. I don’t know. Still, the ending was a very silly resolution that was not the resolution to something serious, so I don’t know what they were thinking with that, either.

Really, them hammering that home is what hurt the movie for me. There was plenty of good stuff. I’ve had this song stuck in my head since I saw the film, for instance. When the Muppets were doing what they do best, they did a bang-up job of it, and reminded me why I wanted to see the movie in the first place. Maybe me and my friends are just broken, and it’s fantastic, but man, it didn’t do enough for me as a movie. So much potential, squandered. Maybe something good will come out of this “relaunch” of the Muppets afterwards, though.

I’ve never been a bigf fan of the muppets myself. I don’t hate them but the only thing I ever liked was Muppet Babies, when I was like three.